Research Guides: Open Access Publishing: Find Open Access Content

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Open Educational Resources

Open educational resources (OER) can be used in place of traditional teaching materials. OER include syllabi, course modules, textbooks, videos, tests, assessment tools, and any other materials used to support learning. OER originate from colleges, universities, libraries, government agencies, publishers, or faculty or other individuals who develop and openly share their teaching resources.

Learn more about OER and how to find and use them in your teaching.

Articles

Directory of Open Access Journals
DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to quality open access, peer-reviewed journals.
PubMed
PubMed is a free resource that includes over 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a free search engine that allows you to search for scholarly content across multiple disciplines, formats, and sources.
OAIster
OAIster is a catalog of over 50 million records representing open access resources from collections worldwide.
BASE (Bielefield Academic Search Engine)
BASE is a freely available search engine for academic open access resources on the web.

Books

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
The DOAB is a searchable index of academic, peer-reviewed, open access books that includes links to the full-text books on the publishers' websites.
OAPEN
The OAPEN Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences.
HathiTrust
HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
The Digital Public Library of America brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world.

Images, Audio, and Other Media

Find Open and Free Images
A VCU Libraries guide to open and free image sources.
Creative Commons Search
This search platform created by Creative Commons helps you search multiple sites for Creative Commons licensed images, video, music, and other media based on the type of use you want to make.
Wikimedia Commons
This repository of public domain and freely-licensed educational media content contains free to use content, but for all media not in the public domain, you’ll need to check the license and comply with its terms.